The present invention relates generally to data networking and, more specifically, to a method and system for automatically interconnecting IPv4 networks across an IPv6 network.
To accommodate the explosive growth of the Internet, a very large number of network nodes have been configured to employ IP (Internet Protocol). These nodes range from user workstations to very high throughput core routers.
The Internet engineering community has been implementing a shift from IPv4 to IPv6. Advantages of IPv6 include an enormous expansion in the available address space to accommodate both greater ubiquity of Internet-enabled devices as well as less reliance on cumbersome network address translation schemes which have been utilized to conserve addresses. IPv6 also provides highly useful auto-configuration capabilities.
There is, therefore, a need for a method for providers to automatically handle IPv4 traffic for their clients across a network they choose to deploy as IPv6-only network. There has been work in developing methods to work with individual IPv4 nodes existing in an IPv6-only network. For example, “Dual Stack Transition Mechanism” (Bound, Jul. 2003, draft-ietf-bound-dstm-exp-00.txt), addresses individual IPv4 nodes in an IPv6 only network. However, this document does not address automatically handling entire networks of IPv4 nodes across an IPv6-only network.